Christians Can Opt Out of ObamaCare. This Outrages Lefties. Tough.

My wife is a member of Christian Health Care Ministries. At age 64, she pays $1,000 a year. What are you paying? You are probably younger, yet you pay more.

You are forced to do this by ObamaCare. My wife is exempt from ObamaCare. Maybe you can be, too.

If you are a Christian, you can cut your health insurance costs by half — maybe more. You can stay out of ObamaCare’s clutches. It’s all legal. These programs got onto the “need not comply” list in 2010. It’s the law. It’s a done deal. The Republicans in Congress are not about to put their constituents back into the “skin them for other people’s health care” pot. The horses are out of Obama’s barn.

This has the Left in a tizzy fit. The thought of it! Bible-believing Christians get a free pass. The atheists must pay full scale. But ObamaCare is a wealth redistribution scheme, as voters know now. So, atheists pay for ObamaCare’s welfare clients, too. Christians don’t pay this if they don’t want to.

My wife does not want to.

Tough providence, atheists! You got Obama. Then he got you. You deserve each other. Warm fuzzies to you all.

Read a cry of Leftist moral outrage in The New York Times. The author is an untenured assistant professor on the public payroll at the University of North Carolina. If she gets tenure, she will be in fat city for the rest of her career. But if she doesn’t, she faces this prospect: teaching at a community college as an untenured adjunct instructor who makes $20/hour, with no health insurance or retirement program, by teaching 150 mediocre (or worse) students each term. You can read about this here. Grim.

She needs published articles to get tenure. She needs them in respected journals — not The Journal of Comparative Obscurity. Maybe she hopes that an op-ed piece in The New York Times will count. This assumes that her department’s tenure evaluation committee has adopted this principle: “screeds = scholarship.” She writes this:

The four main cost-sharing ministries in the United States have about 340,000 members. Regulators in several states have raised concerns that these ministries offer the illusion of insurance while sidestepping the Affordable Care Act’s baseline standards of coverage and skirting requirements that apply to conventional insurance companies, like minimum cash reserves. Nonetheless, membership in the ministries has been growing, particularly since the act granted them an exemption as one of the only ways to avoid the law’s mandate to buy insurance without paying a fine.

But the debate over consumer protections may disguise a more interesting question: Could this model scale up? These ministries seem to achieve a remarkable level of member satisfaction, even if they sometimes must portion out reimbursements when the bills outstrip monthly contributions.

The ministries’ appeal lies partly in their low fees, but also in their ideological boundaries. “This isn’t something that’s for everyone,” said Tony Meggs, the C.E.O. of the Florida-based Christian Care Ministry, which runs a health care sharing program called Medi-Share.

Theological liberals and atheists need not apply.

Christian cost-sharing ministries have been around for about 30 years. They claim that their true origins lie in the Book of Acts, the biblical account of how the first Christians “had everything in common” and “gave to anyone as he had need.” The ministries “show the world something that works, and works well, and is a reflection of the commandments of Christ,” Mr. Meggs said.

For thirty years, these ministries have beaten the insurance industry in terms of price. Now that they are legal under ObamaCare, they have a huge price edge.

Today, Medi-Share requires members to “live by biblical standards:” no tobacco or illegal drugs and no sex “outside of traditional Christian marriage.” Samaritan Ministries, with headquarters in Peoria, Ill., requires a pastor’s approval of medical expenses (and refuses to cover treatment for S.T.D.s unless “contracted innocently”). Liberty HealthShare, based in Independence, Ohio, is the only Affordable Care Act-exempt ministry open to people of many faiths. It asks them to affirm that “it is my spiritual duty to God and my ethical duty to others to maintain a healthy lifestyle.”

Fornicators need not apply.

The great insight of the New Deal reformers was that fetishizing a romantic idea of community is as perilous as making a false idol of the free market. Cost-sharing ministries nurture one kind of community, but only by opting out of the broader obligations of society. To make the Affordable Care Act stick, and to make it work, means convincing more Americans that they are not just their brother’s keeper.

To use the language of John Calvin: there is no chance.

If you are theologically eligible, and you want out of ObamaCare’s high-premium health care options, click here.

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